Background #

The goal of this project is to enable importing of assets from arbitrary sources into Liferay.

Use Cases #

• Importing piecemeal WCM contents from systems such as Drupal, Wordpress, etc. to form new Liferay pages
• Mass-importing (migration) of entire libraries of WCM content into Liferay, when converting a site from some other system.

The Solution #

Basically this is the combination of a wizard + a framework that allows to plug components able to read content from major WCMS and coordinates the logic for creating assets (at least, web contents) in Liferay. The wizard would work as follows:

1. Plug in a reader class. We could start by providing a simple mock class. Further enhancements such as connection URL, credentials, and so on should be placed here. The goal is to set a placeholder for implementing a variety of readers
2. Plug in a converter class: In its simplest version this class will have a getTitle() and getContent() methods which take objects read by the reader class and return the parts that make up a web content. Improvements here would be the addition of specific structures so that the converter returns data to fill each structure component.
3. Set up the destination: basically there are 2 options
1. A running liferay instance, for which some connection data should be specified (url, site/org where the contents will be imported...)
2. Generate a LAR
4. Start the import process: the framework would call the importer, grab the content, convert it and call Liferay API to create web content/generate a LAR file.

Skills Needed #

• Required: Java, JSP
• Nice to have: some knowledge on Liferay plugins, authentication systems and certificates is a plus.

Deliverables #

A plugin hook for Liferay 6.x that implements this functionallity